


Please Stay

by GibbousLunation



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Abusive Parents, Angst, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 06:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3927061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GibbousLunation/pseuds/GibbousLunation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re gonna be alright, you always are. Good grades, obeying every stupid order….” He’d said, dusty back road air billowing around them. It felt like an insult. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sometimes, when stars collapse, there is a moment where they expand outwards, when they are dimming and becoming heavier, and they can only hold on to their shape for so much longer. There is a supernova in Sam Kirk, and it has the potential to decimate everyone around him. Jim wonders if it’s a hereditary thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Please Stay

“Please stay!” 

The plea seemed vapid in the midday heat, a wisp of a thing that shriveled up under the sun. 

He meant it, with every last thread of hope he’d tied down and built his foundations on. The fear and sorrow wound through his wide eyes and sweaty palms, the desperation building in his steps after his brothers turned back, it was all real. This place took things from a person, it all felt washed out and bled dry and they’d both been here for far too long. Jim would give everything he had left to keep his brother with him, but he couldn’t find it in him to force Sam to stay, to really ask that of him when he himself had wanted to do nothing but leave and leave again for years. 

Sam was restless, unhinged. His eyes tracked the endless horizon, he shifted weight from one foot to the other and back, taking small steps towards the house and then bigger ones away. Jim knew he couldn’t convince him to stick around, there was nothing he could say that would hold enough meaning. ‘You’re all I have left’ was too touchy for Sam who spoke fast and blunt and full of heat. Frank took his anger out more on Sam, letting the embers of his teenage angst fester into something darker, something uncontrollable, and it had burnt away all the self-control Sam had left.

“You’re gonna be alright, you always are. Good grades, obeying every stupid order….” He’d said, dusty back road air billowing around them. It felt like an insult. Jim and Sam lived under the shadow of what their lives could have been, a family not broken apart and shattered by grief, a destiny of their own, and a chance to learn who they truly were rather then fighting constantly to prove who they weren’t. Sam had given up years ago, in his mind he had no family. Jim had tried his best, he was smart, he could placate Frank most of the time so that their house didn’t constantly feel like a fusion reactor one atom from annihilation. He got good grades because he dreamed of being better than dirt and dust and alcohol. A part of him hoped his brother was proud of him, that somehow Sam and Jim would get through this and come out on top. They’d make it into Starfleet and travel the galaxies with their mom and unlimited planets not shrouded by the past. Because Jim saw the universe in Sam, and he loved him fiercely, but there was darkness in him too. Jim always hoped he could placate that too, just for the moment, just so they could get out of here.

But Sam was leaving him behind. With his searching furrowed expression and heavy maturity that draped him in strange ways, like a coat that was three sizes too large. Like memories that weren't his. 

“I can’t be a Kirk in this house, show me how and I’ll stay.”

Jim could have cried right there, as If he knew what being a Kirk even meant. He’d never known George Kirk, never really experience Winnona Kirk’s attention or love, and now George Samuel Kirk was leaving him in the dusted, desecrated past. It seemed to Jim that being a Kirk meant leaving everything behind you. It meant existing as a star so when you faded out, everything good you once were would be swallowed up by the sheer weight of your absence, and everything else around you was forced to orbit the space you left. Being a Kirk meant existing as a set of negative spaces, it was what you were not, what you could have been, not what you were now. Sam had known their parents, he'd known Winnona before when her love was vibrant and strong and not a shadow of a thing. He'd basked in their love, in their attention, for a few short years and had it all stripped away in an instant. Jim wasn't sure if he was jealous or if he felt a deep aching pity for his brother. 

Sometimes, when stars collapse, there is a moment where they expand outwards, when they are dimming and becoming heavier, and they can only hold on to their shape for so much longer. Jim can see the barely contained black hole in Sam’s eyes, he can see it in the way his shoulders have become heavier, in the downturn of his lips and the jut of his jaw. There is a supernova in Sam Kirk, and it has the potential to decimate everyone around him. Jim wonders if it’s a hereditary thing. 

Nobody cared how good you were, it was always a comparative factor; good grades just like his dad, obeying orders just like his dad, blue eyes that were just like his dads to the point that his mother couldn’t look at him without wincing. Nobody cared that he’d won his science fair that year, with an experiment he’d created only with dirt, rusty nails from the barn, and some barbed wire because if he’d asked Frank for money to buy supplies, Frank wouldn’t have let him go to school for another two weeks again. Nobody cared that he was his own person, because his whole existence was a reminder of who was missing. His birthday was a day of mourning, because Jim Kirk was a parallel of what should have been, and he was a reminder of who was lost. 

As Sam’s steps faded off into the distance, and he became a heat wave engulfed blur in the distance, something clicked into place in Jim’s mind. His dad had been one of the brightest stars in Starfleet Academy, he was a hero who saved countless of lives in the few seconds he was captain. He was a legacy. Something to tell stories to wide eyed children and leave them tucked nicely in bed with thoughts of lasers and twinkling lights swirling around their heads. 

Jim, was the singularity that had been created when that star had collapsed; he was the center of the swirling black hole that had engulfed everything real and bright in the Kirk family name and warped the remainders. Jim Kirk had always been the central core of its crushing blackness, no matter how hard he worked or how much he did the fact remained that his existence meant pain for everyone else. He’d stolen the smile in Winonna’s eyes so that she couldn't stand to look at him without looking crushed and hollowed. He'd pushed his brother out into the great wastelands beyond simply by being who he was; an absence of light itself rotating slowly in the center of nothing. 

Maybe it was time he acted like it. And Jim Kirk inexplicably broke apart and rebuilt all at once.

He hadn’t been thinking, acting purely on anger and adrenaline and pure self-destruction. There were keys and his dad’s car, Frank’s most prized possession ironically enough wasn’t even his. It was part of his father’s history, just like the house, just like his wife, just like the gap Kirk existed in but never really lived. And Kirk was driving, he was ripping down the dusty heat smudged roads and tearing around corners and there was wind and laughter and he had never in his life felt so free. Kirk laughed as he passed Sam, bewildered expression plastered across his rear view mirror. His feet could barely reach the pedals, his head barely clearing the dashboard to peer at the road in front of him sporadically as it was thrown underneath. Jim Kirk felt real, for once. As himself, not ‘George’s kid’ or Pity Filled Look or Avoided Eye Contact, or any of the memories that constantly dragged down the laugh lines from his mothers eyes. He was James Tiberius Kirk and he was his own future, his own life, and his own end.

He felt an electricity building in his lungs. The sky was perfectly clear, the wind crisp and clear and not weighed down by starchy heat, and he was a single entity hurtling through an open plane. It was beautiful, and it was suffocating. With a jerk of his arm, the twisted a knob at random, old style Terran music pouring and thrumming into the open, shattering apart the quiet. Jim was laughing, a wild sort of glee pulling at his skin; he’d never been reckless, always so careful. He’d been ‘good’ but not ‘good enough’ for anyone. So maybe he let himself be terrible, maybe he should stop trying. Maybe he could be wild enough to rip himself free from the past. 

What did being a Kirk mean? Maybe if he stopped fighting his destiny, he'd know. If he allowed himself to combust at the seams and rip himself apart, if he let himself destroy and break and smirk crookedly the whole time, things would stop being so difficult and endlessly frustrating. After all, what more did he have left to lose? After everything left him in the void alone, what did he owe anyone anymore. There was nothing left to preserve but darkness. 

Jim shouted, an utterly uncontrolled sound, something too free and uninhabited to hold on this dust bowl without crumbling in the wind. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he just couldn't care anymore after caring about everything too much for too long. Sam didn't care, his mother didn't care enough to even look at him, why should he. 

The car phone rang, and suddenly Frank was in the car with his angry dark eyes and pointed eyebrows and endless list of demands. Frank was making threats and bubbling with rage and Jim knew he should be scared, should be apologizing but he just felt like laughing. Frank had never threatened him directly before, it was always about his things. His school, his few friends, his small amount of belongings. Jim hadn't cleaned well enough or taken too long bringing him a drink or forgot to close the door or maybe Frank was in a bad mood and it was his fault for being there at all. Sam got the bad end, the yelling and the fighting and the thrown objects, it was special all for him because he fought back. Jim obeyed quietly, meekly and listened. "Your mother don't even love you shit stains anymore." He'd say, "You're in my house and you follow my rules or you can get out." And they'd lose their toys or their school supplies or they'd have to clean the barn or wash the car for hours. "You'll be just fine," Sam said. Because he kept his head down, because he listened, because he tried. But Jim wasn't fine, none of this was fine. Without Sam there it would be a torrential down pour, goodbye to school and his straight A's and his friends, goodbye to anything pleasant or calming or normal. He'd be trapped, with only himself to destroy. 

'You can’t pin me down anymore. No one can.' And for the first time in forever, Jim grinned and it didn't puncture his cheeks like jagged blades. He wasn't shattered mirrors and splintered reflections, for the first time Jim was fire and ice and he was himself. And it burned and he never wanted to stop. 

When the cops chased him, the car roaring towards an edge of a cliff, he paused for almost too long. Last minute leaping from a quick doom to a longer one. He didn't know what he wanted, but he knew he couldn't give Frank the satisfaction, he couldn't make it seem like a mistake because he was tired of being simply a sad accident. Jim had never felt more thrumming with energy, more alive and he for once didn't care if Sam would be proud or disappointed, or if his mother would be sad, or even if Frank would be livid. Being a Kirk meant an end. It meant giving up and letting go and by god Jim wasn't done yet. 

As he careened from warning to trouble to juvenile hall on Tarsus IV several galaxies away, Jim could do nothing but grin. His blue eyes sparkled and burned and nothing they threw at him would get him to stop. 

He was destruction, and he would take as much as he could with him as the stars were swallowed up. 

And god, it felt so good.


End file.
